Indian Canyons - Palm Canyon

Author's Comments

The first time I dropped down into Palm Canyon I did not believe what I was seeing. You come in across open desert, all dust and creosote and the bare rock of the San Jacintos in the middle distance, and then the trail bends and the floor of the canyon opens below you as a green river of palms. Twenty-six hundred of them, the signs say. From above it reads as a single living thing, a long ribbon of fronds tracing the water that no one tells you is down there until you hear it. I prefer the canyon in February. The stream is running, the light comes in late and low across the eastern wall, and the temperature is honest. Morning is the hour - by midday the canyon floor is bright and flat and the shadows that give the rock its depth have collapsed. Get there when the gate opens. Walk down into the grove rather than around it. The trunks are shaggy with old fronds, the ground is soft, and the sound changes completely once you are under the canopy. The photographs I keep are not the wide ones, though the wide ones are the obvious draw. They are the details - the way the stream catches a single shaft of light between trunks, the texture of the bark up close, a reflection in a still pool no bigger than a dinner plate. This is Cahuilla land, and it feels like it. There is a quietness here that asks you to slow down and notice rather than collect. The canyon closes through the worst of summer for good reason. Come in the cool months, pay the fee, and give it the morning it deserves.

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